https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2010/06/alan-grayson-gives-eisenhower
We have a little exclusive from the great Congressman from Florida.
Alan Grayson adapts Eisenhower’s 1953 speech called: “The Chance For Peace” to make an enormous point in our country today. He’s changed a few words to make it fit into our current narrative, but they are still important and explosive words that all Americans need to hear.
We waste over 600 billion dollars a year on the Military Industrial Complex and if we even cut back 20% on that monstrosity, how much good can we accomplish here? How much change and prosperity can be funneled to every day working class families that toil so hard just to make ends meet?
We have a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross, a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and the point of hope that come with this time. God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil.
They aspire to this: the lifting from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age, a golden age of freedom and of peace. Thank you.
We talk a lot about wingnut welfare and conservatives and Libertarians whine all day long about our tax dollars being used to fund programs that are used for the betterment of our society such as Social Security and Medicare.
Yet they remain quiet and mute, like scarecrows in the middle of a desert when billions upon billions are shifted out of their pockets and into the hands of companies like Blackwater aka Xe Services or some new Star Wars program that is useless unless you’re the recipient of those funds — for the sole purpose of mass destruction rather than enrichment.
Here’ Alan Grayson’s post called “The Longest War.” In it he talks about our need to get out of Afghanistan and has introduced a new bill called The War is Making You Poor Act, HR 5353.
How strange. It turns out that America’s chief military strategist for the past decade is Osama Bin Laden himself. We’ve been doing exactly what he has wanted us to do: spend staggering sums on the military, until the American economy is bled dry. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We are a democracy. We can choose peace.
I have voted against Bin Laden’s strategy to destroy America, and I will continue to do so. But I’ve done more than that. I have introduced a bill called The War is Making You Poor Act, HR 5353.
This bill requires that the war be funded by the Pentagon’s base budget – “only” $549 billion. And it uses the resulting savings to eliminate federal income taxes on your first $35,000 of income – yours and every American’s. It also reduces the deficit.
Bin Laden told us how he would destroy us. And we’re following his instructions, to a “t.” How absurd is that? No more. We have to make our so-called “leaders” listen to us. If we are to survive.
That’s what we’re going to do, together. Sign our petition, and show your support for HR 5353. Ask your friends to do the same. Let’s stop the war, before it stops all of us.
Don’t forget to throw Alan Grayson a few bob at our Blue America10 act blue page. If there is a politician out there who deserves our support, he certainly does.
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